


Bone and Steel

by Idris



Category: Thief (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, Pagans, hammerites
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-09
Updated: 2016-10-09
Packaged: 2018-08-20 11:27:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8247125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Idris/pseuds/Idris
Summary: The Pagans and the Hammerites have more in common than they realise. After all, there are only so many names for unkindness, and fewer still for what comes in its wake. 
Two linked drabbles.





	

If the Hammerites are justice, the Pagans are wrath.

It’s an ambiguous, ever-shifting rage, for they are also duality. The Trickster is a god of many things, none of them easy to define. He is birth and he is death, he is fertility and he is sacrifice, he is the harvest and he is the reaper.

The Pagans have always walked the thin path between worlds. Sometimes the cup holds mead, and sometimes it holds blood.

It takes courage to choose their way, not only a repudiation of one’s past but also of anything that might be called a future. When you become a Pagan, you are no longer your own creature. You are of the forest, and the forest does not deal in rules or in certainties. The past is forgotten and the future unknown.

The Pagans are freedom, and they are chaos.

If you don't look too closely, you can mistake the two for the same thing. People think of leaves, of moonlight through the trees, of escape. They do not understand nature. Nature is beauty and terror and a million years of cruelty. Nature is the Trickster, and the Trickster does not care to learn humanity.

Perhaps that is a mercy.

After all, the Trickster knows unthinking, careless cruelty. If he knew careful, slow, deliberate cruelty… well. Even the hungry thorns of the forest would come to seem like kindness.

* * *

 

 If the Pagans are chaos, the Hammerites are control.

In a way, they know duality as well as the Pagans. A hammer reshapes and strengthens, but it also breaks. They claim it as their symbol, the mark of their god and of their obedience. After all, if you are nothing but the tool of divine will, the hands on the haft are not truly yours… and the blood and the pleading that come are not for you to grieve over.

The Hammerites have blurred the lines so far that terror is become faith and faith is become survival. The people of the City instinctively trust fear, for in a place like this it is fear that will keep you alive when all else has failed you.

They deal in the heat of the forge, but the Hammerites are the children of ice, not fire. They are the coldness of half-frozen steel, blood-stained snow on a naked blade, shaped for a single hard purpose. It is that which gives them their power. The City sneers at weakness. It flinches at immovable purpose.

Better yet when you can give that purpose a name like justice, though a dozen others would fit more closely. Then again, perhaps it is the right name. After all, as the Hammerites would say, justice is not kindness.

**Author's Note:**

> Written because I've been playing the fourth game, and I really miss the old factions. The atmosphere just feels different without them and that blend of the strange and spooky (and sometimes downright scary) that they brought.


End file.
